Talk

Aditya Mukerjee

Aditya is an entrepreneur, investor, and engineer based in New York City. He studied statistics at Columbia and computer science at Cornell, and works on the Risk team at Stripe. When not defending users against online fraudsters, he spends his free time playing German-style board games and listening to embarrassing music.

Aditya organizes Identity Hackers, a group for LGBTQ+ engineers in New York. You can read more of his writing at adityamukerjee.net or on Twitter (@ChimeraCoder).

Crossing the Language Divide: Making Programming Accessible to English and Non-English Speakers Alike

In *The Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy*, the Babel Fish is a universal translator. By allowing all beings to communicate regardless of language, it ‘neatly crosses the language divide between any species’.

Most programming languages are designed for English speakers. Programming language keywords are usually in English, and programmers must understand a basic amount of English in order to collaborate with others on open-source projects written in those languages. But does this need to be the case? Could we create a truly multilingual programming language - one that can be localized, so any developer only ever reads or writes code using their native language, all while maintaining interoperability with code written by developers who speak a different language? And how would we create a multilingual programming language community, allowing developers to collaborate on open-source projects even when they don't speak the same (human) language?

Let's look at an example of a localized programming language: করো (*koro*), which localizes the Go programming language into Bengali, and see how this could be extended to other languages as well. We'll also talk about the steps to making open-source projects fully multilingual, so that developers who only speak English can collaborate seamlessly with developers who don’t speak English at all.

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AlterConf is a traveling conference series that provides safe opportunities for marginalized people and those who support them in the tech and gaming industries.